Level Design in My TTRPG Sessions

The first encounter with the Traitors where they get blindsided by some of the nasty tricks that they have prepared for any that want to hinder their scheme.

The Table

I run several Tabletop RPG games, and I always have plans for more. I think that in my latest one, I’ve really started to pay more attention of the encounters I design, and what they mean in the world, to the players, and to the overall story and themes I’m presenting to my players. My group has recently switched to Savage Worlds, and that’s important for a few reasons, especially the balance to encounters and mobs. We play weekly sessions and the players are part of different affiliations in their world. We play each session as stand alone missions which are decided on (democratically by the players) from a main quest board. I give them a synopsis and mission name, as well if the quest is time sensitive and for how many sessions. In general, the consensus is that this works for our table, as most of the people there have attention span issues if they are tied to a long story, especially if the spearhead player ends up becoming the leader.

So how do I determine what quests to give? I determine it much like a digital RPG and setup questlines with over arching stories that will impact the players and the world they live in. The one they’re currently focused on is a series of kidnappings of valuable people for the information they have or the ransoms the kidnappers could get from them. There are many strings of this, and it’s a large group coordinated effort by some tough villains. It’s noted that the villains (known as the Traitors) have been doing this for a while, however, lately there’s been an influx that brought the attention to the players and their affiliations. After tangoing with some traitors that infiltrated the player’s area and caused some issues, the players noticed how the traitors were prepared in case of a raid. They saved the hostages, but the leaders of that scheme escaped via teleportation circle. They decided that they needed to get rid of the traitors and their schemes in the area.

For the remainder of the quests, they start getting progressively more serious for the players, and they begin to realize there are MAJOR things at the works. This is something that the players felt proud of figuring out. They investigated these disappearances in several ways, each one needing different solutions than the last. The Traitors are meticulous to try to continue with their schemes, but without all of them getting caught, and the players have finally become that unstoppable wall for their schemes, which becomes the major escalation point. It’s at this point that I should mention, the players don’t always save the prisoners, and most feel a little discouraged by things not working out perfectly. This is something that needs to be done with taste and not to be understated with how much defeat should be dealt out. Failure is an option, retreat is sometimes encouraged. I like to show the players that, although their strong, without proper tools and skills, they won’t always accomplish every goal. They may stop the plots in the works, the Traitors may flee, but that doesn’t always mean they saved those missing, or even found them.

The Goals of the Levels

For each level that I design for my players, I create the level with a few goals. Some of the major ones are creating challenge, most of the times winnable, and I’ll go more in depth on why I sometimes don’t want them winnable. The next one is that I want them to flow into the world, and especially the questline that they are going through. Enemies that the player fought in the first quest in the line should know less and be weaker, the enemies in the later quests should be harder to kill and have more plans and strategies to fight against the players that have been the bane of their existence. Finally, I want the quests to utilize the player’s skills and powers, to help them develop their own motivations in the world, and to further those motivations.

Let’s start with the world and where each quest fits into it. The world the players are playing in is smaller than most. There is a single massive city in an underground cavern, filled with ruins and hostile creatures. There are plenty that want to kill the city, one of those groups are the Traitors. Since they don’t have nearly the people, the Traitors are constantly infiltrating and taking resources, both people. items, and information. The success of acquiring these resources can sometimes mean life or death to their own home area. They need magical advances, resources to work with, and people to help them, since they live in this same world, with a lot less protection than the city has. These rings of kidnapping, as they start disappearing, make those traitors panic. They need to put down the players before they lose their grip on things in the city. All of these quests are designed with this in mind, as breaking this idea makes the themes a bit more indistinguishable from general corruption in the city.

Next, lets look at some of the challenge aspects. As I mentioned before, as the quests go on, the players will have harder quests happen. They know the characters, they watch the characters, and they want to ruin the characters just as they’ve done to the traitors. However, this still must be within reason, as an unbeatable quest isn’t a very fair thing to ask, and most players won’t be happy about the results. To combat this, always put a positive spin on failure, while also having a few degrees of failure. Even if the players fail in the most spectacularly way possible, they still gathered the information on faces, locations, etc. so even if they fail to capture the enemies or save the hostages, they still remove their presence just by figuring out where they are and now those traitors need to escape and setup somewhere else. Additionally, make it so that the players fight an uphill battle, but give them signs about what’s to come. Finally, properly adjust for what the players are trying to accomplish. Is the quest something really difficult? Make it more difficult to accomplish with obstacles and enemies or make the skills and necessary items/magics more unique and set. Maybe the only way to protect themselves from a trap is to shut themselves in and teleport to a nearby room. One of the reasons that I like Savage Worlds’ system is that it’s easy to scale encounters to number of players, so if someone cancels last minute, I don’t need to calculate much to adjust. Finally, there’s one final aspect about challenge that I want to talk about. Time sensitive approaches should be carefully planned, especially since the party will want to know that it’s time sensitive and get it out of the way first. Give them more information on these types of quests, if it’s a lot of time, that should signal the need to prepare and the quest should let them know about this. If it’s a short time, it should feel rushed, peoples lives are at stake, and there could be even more implications and altercations that come from this. Giving this extra information is a necessity to fit into the theme of time sensitive things.

Lastly, the need to allow player motivations to appear in the level is a must. If the players are just working through the motions, they don’t really have as much for them other than maybe a little bit of money. Setup the quest with a reason for people to get involved. For the party in this campaign, some are well respected for their titles while others are trying to learn about certain topics or even conceal others. More importantly, they are associated in an academy for those that want to leave the safety of the city walls and be able to find new and exciting things. They know that by completing these quests, they get more freedom, but also more danger. One person is in debt, so it doesn’t even matter what the quest says, they’ll take it as long as everyone else agrees. Once he’s out of debt, he can be a bit more picky, but for now, he needs funds, and that’s his motivation, so I make sure that there are funds and ways to get more so he is inclined to participate. For another, they are a cleric and want to save people and spread their faith, so they try to save people and get them to worship his goddess as a way to say thanks for the saving. Having things that directly appeal to every character can be cumbersome, but it can also make the experience much more rewarding. Another thing that you can do is give the players boons for completing the quests that can be brought up once more. For example, for rescuing a potion shop owner’s child, they got a 10% for all future purchases (up to like 500 coins per item). However, if the shop closes or the shopkeeper vanishes, that boon goes with him, and most people will rush to save it, even if they don’t use it that much. Just to mention though, don’t continuously jeopardize their rewards, or they stop feeling like rewards and make sure that the reason is logically sound in the world.

A Quick Walkthrough

For the first encounter along the quest line with the Traitors, the players were tasked with investigating the potion shop shopkeeper’s daughter’s disappearance. He was unable to locate her magically, and there wasn’t much of a trace that could be followed, as far as he was aware. He also had several shops to run though, and a large gathering that he was hosting for those shops. The players were given a few leads to start themselves out on. One was that she was going to go close shopping at her friend’s store, the other was that he knew she had a hidden diary somewhere, but was unable to locate it himself. Theses opened up other avenues to what might have happened to her, all converging on one point. Generally, it’s best to leave and prepare several bread crumb trails for the players, since you never know what ones they might pursue or ignore. In my case, the players pursued them all, pretty successfully too. Eventually they made it to the entrance of the Traitors’ hideout and challenged it.

The entrance to the Traitor’s underground hideout.

The entrance was a small, cramped tunnel, dug out quickly and shoddily. This should signal that it could be dangerous to use heavy spell attacks on the walls and ceiling. At the end, there was an unlocked door. Due to the players being loud as could be and not even trying the door, they alerted their enemies which moved into the other area. This posed as a dangerous problem for the players, since they no longer had the element of surprise on their side in their enemies home turf. As you can see in the picture, the ground is yellow. It was covered in straw with oil lamps in the area to ignite them. This showed that they were ready to defend this location, or show how devious they could be to cover evidence. In this area, the grunts also slept while the bosses owned the building above, so if they needed to scorch earth, they could also quickly an efficiently kill those that might not be loyal in their sleep. Additionally, using this room, they could keep track of the numbers of their opponents, and use that information to strategize.

This was the den room, a kill trap that caused lots of grief for the players who decided to rush it.

There are a few important pieces of information about this room. The first that there is no door going into it from the entrance room. They can and would be spotted by going into the line of sight of the door, which made it a potent threat to the players. On several occasions, the enemies shot lamps that burst onto the flammable straw flooring, and caused some panic in the players. Resources were used to stop the fires, familiars were put to the task of taking lamps away that were in line of sight, and so on. The next thing of note is that this is a structured foundation. It was obvious in the previous room that it was dug out haphazardly, this one is a basement to a building. This is also important information because it can help tie locations to the crimes, as well as figure out the accomplices involved. Finally, there are crossbow slits in the area opposite the door into the place. This is to help defend the location and keep the defenders safe. They were small so that only the crossbow could fit, with a little wiggle room for aiming. These also posed to be devastatingly effective as threats. For additional oomph, I also gave the crossbow wielders blowback arrows that could blast people backwards. The plan was to keep people out of the room and away from themselves. This worked as intended and was a major thorn in the player’s sides. Their tank kept getting blasted into the previous room, and the damage dealer couldn’t effectively damage the crossbow wielders. There was also someone stationed in the top left corner to ambush and pressure the people in the room, which did help, but was relatively short lived. In the end, the players managed to take control of the room and move into the side room.

The prison area where the prisoners were held where some of the traitors prepared yet another ambush on the players.

In the prison section, I had a few of the kidnappers prepared to defend to the death here. The characters rush in and immediately got a face full of crossbow bolts, becoming injured. This is also where the prisoners are kept from the kidnapping. It’s mostly makeshift with the bars being placed in hastily and could be bent out of place with enough force. There was also a little guard station with a table and chair. This area mostly serves as a point of notice that the main target to save isn’t here, and the players must push forward into the back area. Additionally, this provides as another head counting location, including the potion shop keeper’s daughters, 4 hostages will be found, and only 7 total kidnappers.

The defensive back area with leads to the upstairs house and a teleportation circle for escapes.

Moving onto the back area, there is a bit more to the finale. The two wildcards (basically named characters) are preparing to escape once the players are close to entering. They have Marvella (the daughter) and are prepared to kill her if the players don’t back down. While the hostage taker tries to talk the players down, the other prepares the teleportation circle (players don’t know it’s here) to flee. In the actual session, the players attempted to unlock the door as they were preparing the rune. This had them cut into the daughter’s stomach and flee. The players managed to break in a bit too late, and they only managed to save the daughter.

There is also the desk in the bottom left corner. It has information on the operation as well as the hints that there is currently a kidnapping in progress. The players didn’t recognize this lead however, so the last person was unfortunately taken. There was also talk of the orders that they received from a person labeled as “V”, who will be the quest line’s main boss, likely with a few extra lackies as the two of this one got away. The importance of this is to set up the world interactions in the future. An enemy escaped is an enemy added into the finale.

Final Words

Overall, the way each game master decides to create the levels for their player is their own choice. I tend to try to create mine with as much focus on the world engagement as possible. I want the players to feel the waves created by their actions. While it might be a ripple at first, it could become a tidal wave in the future. This can sometimes be frustrating to players too, so depending on the group and themes that the campaign represents, you should be prepared to adjust as needed. Make it right for your players and yourself, as the game is as good as the people playing make it!